CONTRIBUTING.md

Welcome

We're so glad you're thinking about contributing to this open source project! If you're unsure or afraid of anything, just ask or submit the issue or pull request anyway. The worst that can happen is that you'll be politely asked to change something. We appreciate any sort of contribution, and don't want a wall of rules to get in the way of that.

Before contributing, we encourage you to read our CONTRIBUTING policy (you are here), our LICENSE, and our README, all of which should be in this repository.

Issues

If you want to report a bug or request a new feature, the most direct method is to create an issue in this repository. We recommend that you first search through existing issues (both open and closed) to check if your particular issue has already been reported. If it has then you might want to add a comment to the existing issue. If it hasn't then feel free to create a new one.

Pull requests

If you choose to submit a pull request, you will notice that our continuous integration (CI) system runs a fairly extensive set of linters, syntax checkers, system, and unit tests. Your pull request may fail these checks, and that's OK. If you want you can stop there and wait for us to make the necessary corrections to ensure your code passes the CI checks.

If you want to make the changes yourself, or if you want to become a regular contributor, then you will want to set up pre-commit on your local machine. Once you do that, the CI checks will run locally before you even write your commit message. This speeds up your development cycle considerably.

Setting up pre-commit

There are a few ways to do this, but we prefer to use pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv to create and manage a Python virtual environment specific to this project.

Installing and using pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv

On the Mac, installation is as simple as brew install pyenv pyenv-virtualenv and adding this to your profile:

eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"

For Linux, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), or on the Mac (if you don't want to use brew) you can use pyenv/pyenv-installer to install the necessary tools. Before running this ensure that you have installed the prerequisites for your platform according to the pyenv wiki page.

On WSL you should treat your platform as whatever Linux distribution you've chosen to install.

Once you have installed pyenv you will need to add the following lines to your .bashrc:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.pyenv/bin"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"

If you are using a shell other than bash you should follow the instructions that the pyenv-installer script outputs.

You will need to reload your shell for these changes to take effect so you can begin to use pyenv.

For a list of Python versions that are already installed and ready to use with pyenv, use the command pyenv versions. To see a list of the Python versions available to be installed and used with pyenv use the command pyenv install --list. You can read more here about the many things that pyenv can do. See here for the additional capabilities that pyenv-virtualenv adds to the pyenv command.

Creating the Python virtual environment

Once pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv are installed on your system, you can create and configure the Python virtual environment with these commands:

cd skeleton-python-library
pyenv virtualenv <python_version_to_use> skeleton-python-library
pyenv local skeleton-python-library
pip install --requirement requirements-dev.txt

Installing the pre-commit hook

Now setting up pre-commit is as simple as:

pre-commit install

At this point the pre-commit checks will run against any files that you attempt to commit. If you want to run the checks against the entire repo, just execute pre-commit run --all-files.

Running unit and system tests

In addition to the pre-commit checks the CI system will run the suite of unit and system tests that are included with this project. To run these tests locally execute pytest from the root of the project.

We encourage any updates to these tests to improve the overall code coverage. If your pull request adds new functionality we would appreciate it if you extend existing test cases, or add new ones to exercise the newly added code.

Public domain

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.